Seven Months Since
by The Anonymite
Summary: Ariadne misses a certain vest-wearing guy a lot, and it distracts her from life.  Also, Edith Piaf.  Post-Inception, fluffy  oh God , I think.


**Disclaimer:** I do not own Inception

**a/n:** Man, am I the only one who remembers the days when all I could write was incredibly depressing stuff about characters dying anticlimactic deaths? I think I've caught Fluffy Fic Syndrome.

* * *

Arthur hadn't been lying when he said that jobs were few and far between.

It had been six months, and Ariadne was absolutely drowning. She hadn't dreamed since a week before inception, and though she hadn't particularly minded at first, the total lack of anything subreal had seriously crippled her _joie de vivre_.

Plus, there was that whole "distance makes the heart grow fonder" crap, which had caused her to essentially fall head over heels for a man that wasn't even there.

One kiss—he ruined her clarity of thought for the rest of her life with one kiss.

* * *

Ariadne had never been a particularly twittery, girl-ish girl. She had had crushes like any teenager when she was in high school, but she had never understood how girls let things like that get in the way of having fun, or doing well in school, or focusing on extracurriculars. She had never been twitterpated in her life, and her friends had jokingly labeled her a cold-hearted bitch for not ever being affected by their awkward, jerkish, male counterparts.

That judgment had followed her into college, where she had immediately disposed of it by getting herself wrapped up in a traumatic and brief relationship with a third-year French major. Her name was Mallory, and it had been the most insane month of Ariadne's life. She supposed, later on, that it was convenient in that it had cured her of any misapprehensions of lesbianism she had had about herself.

After that, though, she had dated once or twice, and never gotten much beyond the "I'm going to kiss you and regret it later" phase. After those failed attempts, she had given up and given her life over to being an obscenely focused architecture major.

It must have been…two and a half years since her last date, and she hadn't even noticed until she woke up one morning a month and a half after inception and realized that she'd fallen asleep thinking about Arthur, and had almost dreamed.

Her chest hurt for the rest of the day, and when she got back to her apartment after work, she stared into her fridge for ten minutes, trying to remember some minute smile he'd given her towards the start of her employment under Dom.

"_It's pure creation,"_ she had said, filled to the marrow with awe at this new medium she was only starting to comprehend.

"_There's nothing like it,"_ he had replied, and—there it was. That tiny, tiny smile, showing more in his eyes than his mouth

She didn't realize that she was running up her electricity bill by letting all the warm air into the fridge until Leo rubbed against her leg, making her jump and let go of the door handle.

* * *

Two weeks later, she sat an exam to which she could only answer half the questions, because she had spent her study time reading a book about paradoxes.

* * *

Six weeks after that, her boss hit her upside the head with Chaucer because she had been staring at the cart of books she was supposed to be shelving for ten mintues.

* * *

By the time the Four Months Since Inception mark had passed, Ariadne fancied herself rather desperately in love, and she had absolutely no clue what to do about it.

* * *

At Four and a Half Months Since, she called him, only to find that his phone had been disconnected. Consequently, she realized that she had no way of contacting him, nor did she know where he lived.

L.A.? New York? Tokyo? She had no clue, though she supposed she could see him spending his free time in MoMA, taking day trips to Boston and Baltimore to avoid arousing suspicion for the sheer amount of free time he had.

* * *

She was about to jump off the roof of her building at Six Months Since. Her head hurt, she was tired, her dissertation was half finished despite the fact that it was due in two weeks, and Leo had reached new lows of laziness that did nothing to motivate her. Honestly, it is very hard to move from the sofa to your mildly uncomfortable desk chair when there is a fat, fluffy cat sprawled across your lap.

Thus it was that Ariadne was once again intensely distracted at work. Of course, this really wasn't anything new—Julie, her boss, hadn't let her run a register since November, out of fear that she would once again forget that there was a line of customers to ring up and choose, instead, to doodle on a roll of receipt paper humming "_Non, je ne regrette rien_".

When someone grabbed her elbow and dragged her away from the display table she was arranging, she assumed it was Julie come to chastise her for putting the Dan Browns in the wrong place, or putting all of the copies of Twilight in upside down and backwards (which she probably would have done even if she _had_ been paying attention), and let herself be tugged to…a table in the Starbucks.

She blinked across the table, realizing that Julie didn't have highly attractively prominent cheekbones and an affinity for suit vests that suited her lithe, dancer-like body so perfectly that it was hard to tell whether or not she was simply born in a suit vest.

"We have a job," he started, arching an eyebrow at her stunned expression as he spoke. He started to look concerned when she knocked her chair over in her hurry to get to her feet—he had pushed her into a chair without her really noticing.

"_Mon Dieu_," she said, almost knocking him out of his own chair when she tackled him in a hug.

He blinked, quite surprised at this turn of events, arms coming up automatically to wrap around her waist, though they stopped short of actually touching her.

"Ariadne?"

She was muttering in French, refusing to let go of him as she squeezed her eyes shut, arms tightening around his neck. It didn't seem that she was going to answer the implied concern in his voice.

"Ariadne," he said again, tugging her arms from around his neck, his hands on her upper arms forcing her to pull back enough for him to get a good look at her.

She was shaking slightly, but she froze when Edith Piaf began to sing in the background, eyes going wide. She shook her head, she touched Arthur's face, and she woke up, cursing herself for setting her alarm with that goddamned song.

She was so disappointed she didn't even notice that she had dreamed.

* * *

He showed up outside the school on the day she handed her dissertation in (Seven Months Since), and she was sighing with relief, planning a week of sleep for herself when her eyes landed on him.

He was smiling that tiny, tiny smile—the one that showed more in his eyes than his mouth—and here was no music when she hugged him this time.


End file.
